Sam Palmisano, IBM chairman, president and chief executive, claimed that during this decade, smarter
technologies will spur sustainable efficient economic growth and development in
business, government and society at Chatham House in London.
Palmisano outlined IBM's
"smarter planet" concept, last year at the Council on Foreign
Relations in New York City, namely, that inexpensive but
ultra-fast computer resources were instilling machine intelligence into all
parts of society, but especially into the design, manufacture and delivery of
goods and services worldwide.
At Chatham House yesterday,
Palmisano emphasized how embedded computing resources were imbuing this machine
intelligence into trillions of everything items--from household appliances to
automobiles--as well as nationwide systems, from railways to power grids. To
boot, all of this data is being communicated over the Internet.
From this colossal amalgamation of
diverse data, Palmisano proposes applying smart data harvesting and analysis
techniques to reduce costs, improve efficiency, raise productivity and improve
the quality of all society's products and services worldwide. Smart
technologies are even more important today because they are helping to propel
the worldwide economic recovery--stimulating job creation, making industry
greener and solving the deep problems that caused the global financial crisis
in the first place.
Palmisano went on to outline IBM's
efforts to make a smarter planet, as well as offer his predictions for how
smarter technologies will unfold over the next 10 years. For example, IBM's
deployed traffic congestion management solutions, according to Palmisano, have
already reduced traffic volume by 18 percent, CO2 emissions by 14 percent, and
increased public transit use by 7 percent.
In health care, IBM's smarter
systems are making vital information available at the point-of-care, thereby
improving operational efficiency by 10 percent. Similarly, smarter payment
processing has reduced costs at the Bank of Russia by 95 percent. And in the U.S., areas deploying smart electricity
meters have already saved consumers 10 percent on their power bills and cut peak
power usage by 15 percent. Likewise, supply chain costs to retailers have been
cut by 30 percent, inventories reduced by 25 percent and sales increased by 10
percent, due to smarter analysis of what customers want and making those items
more visible on store shelves.
But to meet the challenges of the
future, Palmisano proposed even smarter applications. For instance, IP
traffic
will reach a trillion gigabytes over the next three years, mandating
smarter
software analytic tools to extract the patterns, correlations and
outliers that
enable decision makers to anticipate, forecast and predict future
scenarios
that would have been total surprises without those
tools.
Smarter technologies produce more
from fewer resources, extend legacy infrastructures and enable next-generation
systems with more inherent sustainability, higher efficiency and stronger
resilience to unexpected changes.
"The good news is, it's
happening," said Palmisano. "Making our planet smarter is in
everyone's interest."
